Schmidt Number: S-5437

On-line since: 28th February, 2011

Anyone who speaks today
about super-sensible worlds lays himself open at once to the quite
understandable criticism that he is violating one of the most
important demands of the age. This is the demand that the most
important questions of existence be seriously discussed from a
scientific point of view only in such a way that science
recognizes its own limitations, having clear insight into the fact
that it must restrict itself to the physical world of earthly
existence and would undoubtedly become a degenerate fantasy if it
were to go beyond these limits. Now, precisely the type of spiritual
scientific perception about which I spoke at the last Vienna Congress
of the Anthroposophical Movement (and shall speak again today), lays
claim not only to being free from hostility toward scientific
thinking and the scientific sense of responsibility of our times, but
also to working in complete harmony with the most conscientious
scientific demands of those very persons who stand on the ground of
the most rigorous natural science. It is possible, however, to speak
from various points of view regarding the scientific demands of the
times that are imposed on us by the theoretical and practical
results in the evolution of humanity, which have emerged in such a
splendid way in the course of the last three or four centuries, but
especially during the nineteenth century. Therefore, I shall speak
today about super-sensible knowledge in so far as it tends to fulfill
precisely this demand, and I wish to speak in another lecture
about the super-sensible knowledge of the human being as a demand of
the human heart, of human feeling, during the present age.

We can observe the
magnificent contribution which scientific research has brought
us even up to the most recent time — the magnificent
contribution in the findings about relationships throughout the
external world. But it is possible to speak in a different
sense regarding the achievements which have come about precisely in
connection with this current of human evolution. For instance, we may
call attention to the fact that, through the conscientious,
earnest observation of the laws and facts of the external world of
the senses, as is supplied by natural science, very special human
capacities have been developed, and that just such observation
and experimentation have thrown a light also upon human capacities
themselves. But I should like to say that many persons holding
positions deserving the greatest respect in the sphere of scientific
research are willing to give very little attention to this light
which has been reflected upon man himself through his own
researches.

If we only give a little
thought to what this light has illuminated, we see that human
thinking, through the very fact that it has been able to investigate
both narrow and vast relationships — the microscopic and
the telescopic — has gained immeasurably in itself: has gained
in the capacity of discrimination, has gained in power of
penetration, to associate the things in the world so that their
secrets are unveiled, and to determine the laws underlying cosmic
relationships, and so forth. We see, as this thinking develops, that
a standard is set for this thinking, and it is set precisely for the
most earnest of those who take up this research: the demand that this
thinking must develop as selflessly as possible in the observation of
external nature and in experimentation in the laboratory, in the
clinic, etc. And the human being has achieved tremendous power in
this respect. He has succeeded in setting up more and more
rules whose character prevents anything of the nature of inner wishes
of the heart, of opinions, perhaps even of fantasies regarding one's
own being such as arise in the course of thinking, from being
carried over into what he is to establish by means of the
microscope and the telescope, the measuring rule and the
scales, regarding the relationships of life and existence.

Under these influences a
type of thinking has gradually developed about which one must say
that it has worked out its passive role with a certain inner
diligence. Thinking in connection with observation, with experiment,
has nowadays become completely abstract — so abstract that it
does not trust itself to conjure anything of the nature of knowledge
or of truth from its own inner being.

It is this gradually
developed characteristic of thinking which demands before everything
else — and above all it seems — the rejection of all that
the human being is in himself by reason of his inner nature. For what
he himself is must be set forth in activity; this can really never
exist wholly apart from the impulse of his will. Thus we have arrived
at the point — and we have rightly reached this point in the
field of external research — of actually rejecting the activity
of thinking, although we became aware in this activity of what
we ourselves mean as human beings in the universe, in the totality of
cosmic relationships. In a certain sense, the human being has
eliminated himself in connection with his research; he prohibits his
own inner activity. We shall see immediately that what is rightly
prohibited in connection with this external research must be
especially cultivated in relationship to man's own self if he wishes
to gain enlightenment about the spiritual, about the
super-sensible element of his own being.

But a second element in the
nature of man has been obliged to manifest its particular side in
modem research, a side which is alien to humanity even though
friendly to the world: that is, the human life of sentiment, the
human life of feeling. In modem research, human feeling is not
permitted to participate; the human being must remain cold and
matter-of-fact. Yet one might ask whether it were possible to acquire
within this human feeling forces useful in gaining knowledge of the
world. One can say, on the one hand, that inner human caprice plays a
role in feelings, in human subjectivity, and that feeling is
the source of fantasy. On the other hand, one can reply that human
feeling can certainly play no distinct role as it exists chiefly in
everyday and in scientific life. Yet, if we recall — as science
itself must describe it to us — that the human senses have not
always, in the course of human evolution, been such as they are
today, but have developed from a relatively imperfect stage up to
their present state, if we recall that they certainly did not
express themselves in earlier periods as objectively about
things as they do today, an inkling may then dawn in us that there
may exist, even within the life of subjective feeling, something that
might evolve just as did the human senses themselves, and which might
be led from an experience of man's own being over to a comprehension
of cosmic relationships in a higher sense. Precisely as we
observe the withdrawal of human feeling in connection with
contemporary research must the question be raised: could not some
higher sense unfold within feeling itself, if feeling were
particularly developed?

But we find eminently clear
in a third element in the being of man how we are impelled from
an altogether praiseworthy scientific view to something
different: this is the will aspect of the life of the soul. Whoever
is at home in scientific thinking knows how impossible it is
for such thinking to grasp the relationships of the world other than
through causal necessity. We link in the most rigid manner
phenomena existing side by side in space; we link in the
strictest sense phenomena occurring one after another in time. That
is, we relate cause and effect according to their inflexible laws.
Whoever speaks, not as a dilettante, but as one thoroughly at
home in science, knows what a tremendous power is exerted by the mere
consideration of the realms of scientific fact in this manner. He
knows how he is captivated by this idea of a universal
causality and how he cannot do otherwise than to subject everything
that he confronts in his thinking to this idea of causality.

But there is human will,
this human will which says to us in every moment of our waking life
of day: “What you undertake in a certain sense by reason of
yourself, by reason of your will, is not causally determined in the
same sense that applies to any sort of external phenomena of
nature.” For this reason, even a person who simply feels in a
natural way about himself, who looks into himself in observation free
from preconception, can scarcely do otherwise than also to ascribe to
himself, on the basis of immediate experience, freedom of will. But
when he turns his glance to scientific thinking, he cannot admit this
freedom of will. This is one of the conflicts into which we are
brought by the condition of the present age. In the course of our
lectures we shall learn much more about the conflicts. But for one
who is able to feel this conflict in its full intensity, who can feel
it through and through — because he must be honest on the one
side concerning scientific research, and on the other side concerning
his self-observation — the conflict is something utterly
confounding, so confounding that it may drive him to doubt whether
there is anywhere in life a firm basis from which one may search for
truth.

We must deal with such
conflicts from the right human perspective. We must be able to say to
ourselves that research drives us to the point where we are actually
unable to admit what we are everyday aware of: that something else
must somehow exist which offers another approach to the world than
that which is offered to us in irrefutable manner in the external
order of nature. Through the very fact that we are so forcibly driven
into such conflicts by the order of nature itself, it becomes for
human beings of the present time a necessity to admit the
impossibility of speaking about the super-sensible worlds as they have
been spoken about until a relatively recent time. We need go back
only to the first half of the nineteenth century to discover
individuals who, by reason of a consciousness in harmony with the
period, were thoroughly serious in their scientific work, and yet who
called attention to the super-sensible aspect of human life, to that
aspect which opens up to the human being a view of the divine,
of his own immortality; and in this connection they always called
attention to what we may at present designate as the “night
aspects” of human life. Men deserving of the very highest
regard have called attention to that wonderful but very problematical
world into which the human being is transferred every night: to the
dream world. They have called attention to many mysterious
relationships which exist between this chaotic picture-world of
dreams and the world of actuality. They have called attention to the
fact that the inner nature of the human organization, especially in
illness, reflects itself in the fantastic pictures of dreams, and how
healthy human life enters into the chaotic experiences of dreams in
the forms of signs and symbols. They pointed out that much which
cannot be surveyed by the human being with his waking senses fords
its place in the half-awake state of the soul, and out of such
matters conclusions were drawn. These matters border upon the subject
that many people still study today, the
“subconscious” states of the life of the human
soul, which manifest themselves in a similar way.

But everything which
appears before the human being in this form, which could still give a
certain satisfaction to an earlier humanity, is no longer valid for
us. It is no longer valid for us because our way of looking into
external nature has become something different. Here we have to look
back to the times when there existed still only a mystically
colored astrology. Man then looked into the world of the senses
in such a way that his perception was far removed from the exactness
which we demand of science today. Because he did not demand of
himself in his sense life that complete clarity which we possess
today, he could discover in a mystical, half-conscious state
something from which he could draw inferences. This we cannot do
today. Just as little as we are able to derive today, from what
natural science gives us directly, anything other than questions
regarding the true nature of man, just so little can we afford to
remain at a standstill at the point reached by natural science and
expect to satisfy our super-sensible needs in a manner similar
to that of earlier times.

That form of super-sensible
knowledge of which I shall speak here has an insight into this demand
of our times. It observes what has become of thinking, feeling, and
willing in man precisely through natural science, and it asks, on the
other side, whether it may be possible by reason of the very
achievements of contemporary humanity in thinking, feeling, and
willing to penetrate further into the super-sensible realm with the
same clarity which holds sway in the scientific realm. This
cannot be achieved by means of inferential reasoning, by means of
logic; for natural science justly points out its limitations with
reference to its own nature. But something else can occur: the inner
human capacities may evolve further, beyond the point at which they
stand when we are in the realm of ordinary scientific research, so
that we now apply to the development of our own spiritual capacities
the same exactness which we are accustomed to applying to research in
the laboratory and the clinic. I shall discuss this first in
connection with thinking itself.

Thinking, which has become
more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with
external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of
energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in
such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply
this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in
relationship to its own development in the sense in which the
external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is
accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his
research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition
of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation,
the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly
exact development of this thinking. It is possible here to indicate
only the general principles of what I have said regarding such an
exact development of thinking in my books, Occult Science,
an Outline, Knowledge of the Higher Words and Its Attainment, and
other books. The human being should really compel himself, for the
length of time which is necessary for him — and this is
determined by the varying innate capacities of people — to
exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which
he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different
role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity
of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day,
even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought
— the content of which is not the important matter — and,
while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing
all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought.
By means of this process something comes about in the development of
those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which
follow when any particular muscles of the human body — for
instance, the muscles of the arms — are to be developed. The
muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through
exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become
inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite
thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a
really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our
thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he
undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem. This can
be done in the greatest variety of ways. When I say that something
should be selected for this content of concentration that one
fords in any sort of book — even some worthless old volume that
we know quite certainly we have never previously seen — this
may seem trivial. The important point is not the content of truth in
the thing, but the fact that we survey such a thought content
completely. This cannot be done if we take a thought content
out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought
in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the
subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact
if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in
the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely
new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual
content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul.
What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and
the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a
person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to
provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to
entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case
entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it.
Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon
someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is
not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they
take such a thought content out of their own memories and
experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of
subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who
has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of
scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be,
indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a
relatively long time, even for years, perhaps — and this must
be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks
or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases
years — it is possible to arrive at a point where this method
for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as
exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of
measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the
secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the
further development of one's own thinking. At a certain
moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he
feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which
depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in
inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion
as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding
to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which
one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant
experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one
begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's
own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A
reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the
process of breathing or the activity of a muscle — this inner
activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated
precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in
full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active
thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that
knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real
objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete
inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at
the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the
process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler
— not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the
physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a
spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings
if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in
expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been
transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and
more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into
contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your
finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is
physically real.”

Only when one has lived for
a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete
self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul
element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential
reality.

It is possible then for the
person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the
point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it
away; he can, in a certain sense, render his consciousness void of
what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought
content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to
possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul.
It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness;
we need only fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of
force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a
definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in
connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has
become a reality. Yet we succeed in putting aside this content of
thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the
powerful force needed for concentration. When we have succeeded in
this, something appears before the soul which has been possible
previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's
memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way
before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in
his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of
time to which one's memory can return, at which point one entered
consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing
we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call
up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now
experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same
kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do
not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through
ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in
spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out
such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the
result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to
go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for
instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back
through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed
through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in
the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of
the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its
significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This
becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even
according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great
terror, a severe shock — at the moment of drowning, for
instance — when for some moments he is confronted by something
of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul
— to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering
fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such
cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the
soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts
one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only
now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real
self-observation.

It is quite possible to
differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which
constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the
memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural
occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this
memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world
comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which
appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which
has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain
definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a
beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person
came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to
the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is
the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he
ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led
to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with
himself.

That which has taken place
through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one
with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this
precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding
much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the
light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look
upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from
preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the
searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called
imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.

But one can progress beyond
this stage. In that which we come to know through this memory
tableau, we are confronted by those forces which have really
formed us as human beings. One knows now: “Within you those
forces evolve which mold the substances of your physical body. Within
you, especially during childhood, those forces have evolved which,
approximately up to the seventh year, have plastically modeled the
nerve masses of the brain, which did not yet exist in well-ordered
form after your birth.” We then cease at last to ascribe what
works formatively upon the human being to those forces which inhere
in material substances. We cease to do this when we have this memory
tableau before us, when we see how into all the forces of nutrition
and of breathing and into the whole circulation of the blood stream
the contents of this memory tableau — which are forces in
themselves, forces without which no single wave of the blood
circulates and no single process of breathing occurs. We now learn to
understand that man himself in his inner being consists of spirit and
soul.

What now dawns upon one can
best be described by a comparison. Imagine that you have walked for a
certain distance over ground which has been softened by rain, and
that you have noticed all the way tracks or ruts made by human feet
or wagon wheels. Now suppose that a being came from the moon and saw
this condition of the ground, but saw no human being. He would
probably conclude that there must be all sorts of forces underneath
the earth which have thrust up these traces and given this form to
the surface of the ground. Such a being might seek within the earth
for the forces which have produced the tracks. But one who sees
through the matter knows that the condition was not caused by the
earth but by human feet or wagon wheels.

Now, anyone who possesses a
view of things such as I have just described does not at all look,
for this reason, with less reverence, for example, upon the
convolutions of the human brain. Yet, just as he knows that those
tracks on the surface of the earth do not derive from forces within
the earth, he now knows that these convolutions of the brain do not
derive from forces within the substance of the brain, but that the
spiritual-psychic entity of man is there, which he himself has now
beheld, and that it works in such a way that our brain has these
convolutions. This is the essential thing — to be driven to
this view, so that we arrive at a conception of our own spirit-soul
nature, so that the eye of the soul is really directed to the
soul-spiritual element and to its manifestations in the
external life.

But it is possible to
progress still further. After we strengthen our inner being through
concentrating upon a definite thought content; and after we then
empty our consciousness so that, instead of the images we
ourselves have formed, the content of our life appears before us; now
we can put this memory tableau out of our consciousness, just as we
previously eliminated a single concept, so that our
consciousness is empty of this. We can now learn to apply this
powerful force to efface from our consciousness that which we have
come to know through a heightened self-observation as a spirit-soul
being. In doing this, efface nothing less than the inner being of our
own soul life. We learned first in concentration to efface what
is external, and we then learned to direct the gaze of our soul to
our own spirit-soul entity, and this completely occupied the whole
tableau of memory. If we now succeed in effacing this memory tableau
itself, there comes about what I wish to designate as the truly empty
consciousness. We have previously lived in the memory tableau or in
what we ourselves have set up before our minds, but now something
entirely different appears. That which lived within us we have now
suppressed, and we confront the world with an empty
consciousness. This signifies something extraordinary in the
experience of the soul. Fundamentally speaking, I can describe
at first only by means of a comparison what now appears to the soul,
when the content of our own soul is effaced by means of the
powerful inner force we apply. We need only think of the fact
that, when the impressions of the external senses gradually die away,
when there is a cessation of seeing, hearing, perhaps even of a
distinct sense of touch, we sink into a state closely resembling the
state of sleep. Now, however, when we efface the content of our
own souls, we come to an empty state of consciousness, although this
is not a state of sleep. We reach what I might call the state of
being merely awake — that is, of being awake with an empty
consciousness.

We may, perhaps, conceive
this empty consciousness in the following way: imagine a modern city
with all its noise and din. We may withdraw from the city, and
everything becomes more and more quiet around us; but we finally
arrive, perhaps deep within a forest. Here we find the absolute
opposite of the noises of the city. We live in complete inner
stillness, in hushed peace. If, now, I undertake to describe what
follows, I must resort to a trivial comparison. We must raise the
question whether this peace, this stillness, can be changed
still further into something else. We may designate this stillness as
the zero point in our perception of the external world. If we
possess a certain amount of property and we subtract from this
property, it is diminished; as we take away still more, it is
further diminished; and we finally arrive at zero and have nothing
left. Can we then proceed still further? It may, perhaps, be
undesirable to most persons, but the fact is that many do this: they
decrease their possessions further by incurring debt. One then has
less than zero, and one can still diminish what one has. In precisely
the same way, we may at least imagine that the stillness, which is
like the zero point of being awake, may be pushed beyond this zero
into a sort of negative state. A super-stillness, a super-peace may
augment the quietness. This is what is experienced by one who blots
out his own soul content: he enters into a state of quietness of soul
which lies below the zero point. An inner stillness of soul in the
most intensified degree comes about during the state of
wakefulness.

This cannot be attained
without being accompanied by something else. This can be attained
only when we feel that a certain state, linked with the picture
images of our own self, passes over into another state. One who
senses, who contemplates the first stage of the super-sensible within
himself, is in a certain state of well-being, that well-being and
inner blissfulness to which the various religious creeds refer when
they call attention to the super-sensible and at the same time remind
the human being that the super-sensible brings to him the experience
of a certain blissfulness in his inner being. Indeed, up to the point
where one excluded one's own inner self, there was a certain sense of
well-being, an intensified feeling of blissfulness. At that moment,
however, when the stillness of soul comes about, this inner
well-being is replaced completely by inner pain, inner deprivation,
such as we have never known before — the sense that one is
separated from all to which one is united in the earthly life, far
removed not only from the feeling of one's own body but from the
feeling of one's own experiences since birth. And this means a
deprivation which increases to a frightful pain of soul. Many shrink
back from this stage; they cannot find the courage to make the
crossing from a certain lower clairvoyance, after eliminating their
own content of soul, to the state of consciousness where
resides that inner stillness. But if we pass into this stage in full
consciousness there begins to enter, in place of Imagination,
that which I have called, in the books previously mentioned,
Inspiration — I trust you will not take offense at these terms
— the experience of a real spiritual world. After one has
previously eliminated the world of the senses and established
an empty consciousness, accompanied by inexpressible pain of
soul, then the outer spiritual world comes to meet us. In the state
of Inspiration we become aware of the fact that the human being is
surrounded by a spiritual world just as the sense world exists for
his outer senses.

And the first thing, in
turn, that we behold in this spiritual world is our own
pre-earthly existence. Just as we are otherwise conscious of earthly
experiences by means of our ordinary memory, so does a cosmic memory
now dawn for us: we look back into pre-earthly experiences, beholding
what we were as spirit-soul beings in a purely spiritual world before
we descended through birth to this earthly existence, when as
spiritual beings we participated in the molding of our own bodies. So
do we look back upon the spiritual, the eternal, in the nature
of man, to that which reveals itself to us as the pre-earthly
existence, which we now know is not dependent upon the birth
and death of the physical body, for it is that which existed before
birth and before conception which made a human being out of this
physical body derived from matter and heredity. Now for the first
time one reaches a true concept also of physical heredity, since one
sees what super-sensible forces play into this — forces which
we acquire out of a purely spiritual world, with which we now feel
united just as we feel united with the physical world in the earthly
life. Moreover, we now become aware that, in spite of the great
advances registered in the evolution of humanity, much has been lost
which belonged inherently to more ancient instinctive
conceptions that we can no longer make use of today. The instinctive
super-sensible vision of humanity of earlier ages was confronted by
this pre-earthly life as well as human immortality, regarding which
we shall speak a little later. For eternity was conceived in ancient
times in such a way that one grasped both its aspects. We speak
nowadays of the immortality of the human soul — indeed, our
language itself possesses only this word — but people once
spoke, and the more ancient languages continue to show such words, of
unborn-ness [Ungeborenheit] as the
other aspect of the eternity of the human soul. Now, however,
the times have somewhat changed. People are interested in the
question of what becomes of the human soul after death, because this
is something still to come; but as to the other question, what
existed before birth, before conception, there is less interest
because that has “passed,” and yet we are here. But a
true knowledge of human immortality can arise only when we consider
eternity in both its aspects: that of immortality and that of
unborn-ness.

But, for the very purpose
of maintaining a connection with the latter, and especially in an
exact clairvoyance, still a third thing is necessary. We sense
ourselves truly as human beings when we no longer permit our feelings
to be completely absorbed within the earthly life. For that
which we now come to know as our pre-earthly life penetrates into us
in pictures and is added to what we previously sensed as our
humanity, making us for the first time completely human. Our feelings
are then, as it were, shot through with inner light, and we know that
we have now developed our feeling into a sense organ for the
spiritual. But we must go further and must be able to make our will
element into an organ of knowledge for the spiritual.

For this purpose, something
must begin to play a role in human knowledge which, very rightly, is
not otherwise considered as a means of knowledge by those who
desire to be taken seriously in the realm of cognition. We first
become aware that this is a means of knowledge when we enter the
super-sensible realms. This is the force of love. Only, we must begin
to develop this force of love in a higher sense than that in which
nature has bestowed love upon us, with all its significance for the
life of nature and of man. It may seem paradoxical what I must
describe as the first steps in the unfolding of a higher love in the
life of man.

When you try, with full
discretion for each step, to perceive the world in a certain
other consciousness than one usually feels, then you come to the
higher love. Suppose you undertake in the evening, before you go to
sleep, to bring your day's life into your consciousness so that you
begin with the last occurrence of the evening, visualizing it as
precisely as possible, then visualizing in the same way the next
preceding, then the third from the last, thus moving backward
to the morning in this survey of the life of the day; this is a
process in which much more importance attaches to the inner energy
expended than to the question whether one visualizes each individual
occurrence more or less precisely. What is important is this reversal
of the order of visualization. Ordinarily we view events in
such a way that we first consider the earlier and then the subsequent
in a consecutive chain. Through such an exercise as I have just
described to you, we reverse the whole life; we think and feel in a
direction opposite to the course of the day. We can practice
this on the experiences of our day, as I have suggested, and this
requires only a few minutes. But we can do this also in a
different way. Undertake to visualize the course of a drama in
such a way that you begin with the fifth act and picture it advancing
forwards through the fourth, third, toward the beginning. Or we may
place before ourselves a melody in the reverse succession of tones.
If we pass through more and more such inner experiences of the soul
in this way, we shall discover that the inner experience is freed
from the external course of nature, and that we actually become more
and more self-directing. But, even though we become in this way more
and more individualized and achieve an ever-increasing power of
self-direction, we learn also to give attention to the external
life in more complete consciousness. For only now do we become aware
that, the more powerfully we develop through practice this
fully conscious absorption in another being, the higher becomes
the degree of our selflessness, and the greater must our love become
in compensation. In this way we feel how this experience of not
living in oneself but living in another being, this passing over from
one's own being to another, becomes more and more powerful. We then
reach the stage where, to Imagination and Inspiration, which we
have already developed, we can now add the true intuitive ascending
into another being: we arrive at Intuition, so that we no longer
experience only ourselves, but also learn — in complete
individualism yet also in complete selflessness — to experience
the other being.

Here love becomes something
which gradually makes it possible for us to look back even further
than into the pre-earthly spiritual life. As we learn in our present
life to look back upon contemporary events, we learn through such an
elevation of love to look back upon former earth lives, and to
recognize the entire life of a human being as a succession of earthly
lives. The fact that these lives once had a beginning and must
likewise have an end will be touched upon in another lecture. But we
learn to know the human life as a succession of lives on earth,
between which there always intervene purely spiritual lives,
coming between a death and the next birth. For this elevated form of
love, lifted to the spiritual sphere and transformed into a force of
knowledge, teaches us also the true significance of death. When we
have advanced so far, as I have explained in connection with
Imagination and Inspiration, as to render these intensified
inner forces capable of spiritual love, we actually learn in
immediate exact clairvoyance to know that inner experience
which we describe by saying that one experiences oneself spiritually,
without a body, outside the body. This passing outside the body
becomes in this way, if I may thus express it, actually a matter of
objective experience for the soul. If one has experienced this
spiritual existence one time outside of the body, clairvoyantly
perceived, I should like to say, then one knows the significance of
the event of laying aside the physical body in death, of passing
through the portal of death to a new, spiritual life. We thus learn,
at the third stage of exact clairvoyance, the significance of death,
and thus also the significance of immortality, for man.

I have wished to make it
transparently clear through the manner of my explanation that the
mode of super-sensible cognition about which I am speaking seeks to
bring into the very cognitional capacities of the human being
something which works effectually, step by step, as it is thus
introduced. The natural scientist applies this exactness to the
external experiment, to the external observation; he wishes to
see the objects in such juxtaposition that they reveal their secrets
with exactitude in the process of measuring, enumerating,
weighing. The spiritual scientist, about whom I am here speaking,
employs this exactness to the evolution of the forces of his own
soul. That which he uncovers in himself, through which the
spiritual world and human immortality step before his soul, is
made in a precise manner, to use an expression of Goethe's. With
every step thus taken by the spiritual scientist, in order that the
spiritual world may at last lie unfolded before the eyes of the soul,
he feels obligated to be as conscientious in regard to his perception
as a mathematician must be with every step he takes. For just as the
mathematician must see clearly into everything that he writes on the
paper, so must the spiritual scientist see with absolute precision
into everything that he makes out of his powers of cognition. He then
knows that he has formed an “eye of the soul” out of the
soul itself through the same inner necessity with which nature has
formed the corporeal eye out of bodily substance. And he knows that
he can speak of spiritual worlds with the same justification with
which he speaks of a physical-sensible world in relationship to
the physical eye. In this sense the spiritual research with which we
are here concerned satisfies the demands of our age imposed upon us
by the magnificent achievements of natural science — which
spiritual science in no way opposes but, rather, seeks to
supplement.

I am well aware that
everyone who undertakes to represent anything before the world,
no matter what his motive may be, attributes a certain importance to
himself by describing this as a “demand of the times.” I
have no such purpose; on the contrary, I should like to show that the
demands of the times already exist, and the very endeavor of
spiritual science at every step it takes is to satisfy these demands
of the times. We may say, then, that the spiritual scientist whom it
is our purpose to discuss here does not propose to be a person who
views nature like a dilettante or amateur. On the contrary, he
proposes to advance in true harmony with natural science and with the
same genuine conscientiousness. He desires truly exact clairvoyance
for the description of a spiritual world. But it is clear to him at
the same time that, when we undertake to investigate a human corpse
in a laboratory for the purpose of explaining the life which has
disappeared from it, or when we look out into cosmic space with a
telescope, we then develop capacities which tend to adapt
themselves at first solely to the microscope or telescope, but which
possess an inner life and which misrepresent themselves in their
form. If we dissect a human corpse, we know that it was not nature
that directly made the human being into this bodily form, but that
the human soul, which has now withdrawn from it, made it. We
interpret the human soul from what we have here as its physical
product, and one would be irrational to assume that this molding of
the human physical forces and forms had not arisen out of what
preceded the present state of this human being. But from all that we
hold back, as we meanwhile investigate dead nature with the
forces from which one rightly withdraws one's inner activity, from
the very act of holding back is created the ability to develop
further the human soul forces. Just as the seed of the plant lies out
of sight under the earth when we have laid it in the soil, and yet
will become a plant, so do we plant a seed in the soul in the very
action of conscientious scientific research. He who is a serious
scientist in this sense has within himself the germ of imaginative,
inspired, and intuitive knowledge. He needs only to develop the germ.
He will then know that, just as natural science is a demand of the
times, so likewise is super-sensible research. What I mean to say is
that everyone who speaks in the spirit of natural science
speaks also in the spirit of super-sensible research, only without
knowing this. And that which constitutes an unconscious longing in
the innermost depths of many persons today — as will be
manifest in another public lecture — is the impulse of
super-sensible research to unfold out of its germ.

To those very persons,
therefore, who oppose this spiritual research from a supposedly
scientific standpoint, one would like to say, not with any bad
intention, that this brings to mind an utterance in Goethe's Faust
all too well known, but which would be applied in a different
sense:

The little man would not
sense the Devil

Even if he held him by the
throat.

I do
not care to go into that now. But what lies in this saying confronts
us with a certain twist in that demand of the times: that those who
speak rightly today about nature are really giving expression, though
unconsciously, to the spirit. One would like to say that there are
many who do not wish to notice the “spirit” when it
speaks, although they are constantly giving expression to the spirit
in their own words!

The seed of super-sensible
perception is really far more widespread today than is supposed, but
it must be developed. The fact that it must be developed is
really a lesson we may learn from the seriousness of the times in
reference to external experiences. As I have already said, I should
like to go into the details another time: but we may still add in
conclusion that the elements of a fearful catastrophe really
speak to the whole of humanity today through various
indications in the outside world, and that it is possible to
realize that tasks at which humanity in the immediate future will
have to work with the greatest intensity will struggle to birth out
of this great seriousness of the times. This external seriousness
with which the world confronts us today, especially the world
of humanity, indicates the necessity of an inner seriousness. And it
is about this inner seriousness in the guidance of the human heart
and mind toward man's own spiritual powers, which constitute the
powers of his essential being, that I have wished to speak to you
today. For, if it is true that man must apply his most powerful
external forces in meeting the serious events awaiting him over
the whole world, he will need likewise a powerful inner courage. But
such forces and such courage can come into existence only if the
human being is able to feel and also to will himself in full
consciousness in his innermost being, not merely theoretically
conceiving himself but practically knowing himself. This is
possible for him only when he comes to know that this being of his
emerges from the source from which it truly comes, from the source of
the spirit; only when in ever-increasing measure, not only
theoretically but practically, he learns to know in actual experience
that man is spirit; and can find his true satisfaction only in the
spirit: that his highest powers and his highest courage can come to
him only out of the spirit, out of the super-sensible.